ECB chief taking a hard line on Stokes

ENGLAND’S banished cricketer Ben Stokes is facing a hardline approach from influential eCB board member lord patel.

British-Asian lord patel, who became an eCB director in July 2015, is understood to be the member of the board who is insisting that any finding against Stokes for misconduct leads to a heavy punishment from the eCB once the judicial process has taken its course.

lord patel, a lifelong recreational cricketer and one of the country’s most respected spokesmen on health, social care and equality, is known to have been horrified by the Bristol brawl incident that has seen Stokes miss the Ashes tour.

The labour peer, charged with improving eCB connections with British-Asian communities, was also highly concerned about the game’s image being hit as critics accused england’s talisman cricketer Stokes of mocking model Katie price’s disabled son Harvey in a social media clip. That incident, as well as the Bristol one, played a part in Stokes losing his personal sponsorship from england kit suppliers new Balance.

The Stokes situation remains the elephant in the room as it has been from the start of the tour. And Stokes’s agent neil Fairbrother, who has been criticised by some in the eCB hierarchy for not keeping a tighter lid on the saga, is returning to Australia for the Sydney Test next week.

SOMEONE at Melbourne Cricket Club was having a laugh yesterday when, for their lunch in the committee room hosting their sister club MCC, they placed lord’s grandees peter leaver and gerald Corbett next to each other.

leaver, former chief executive of the premier league, is the only member of the MCC committee known to have opposed Corbett remaining chairman for a second term. Meanwhile, some things about a Melbourne Test never change. one of them is that former MCC chief executive roger Knight, who now spends a lot of his time in new Zealand, remains top of the freeloader list.

LMICHAEL CAIRNS, business tycoon both in Australia and UK who wasn’t the most popular chairman of Lancashire cricket until he stood down last May, is surprisingly still associating himself with Old Trafford when mixing with English county officials in the swish facilities at the MCG.

lANDREWSAMSON has become such a peerless statistician on BBC’s Test Match Special that he fully deserves the ‘bearded wonder’ sobriquet of the late Bill Frindall. Yesterday’s cricket detective work saw Samson (right) uncover who really faced the first eight-ball over in English cricket in 1939 for Oxford University v Gloucestershire — a certain Richard Sale — when cricket bible Wisden had the wrong name as No 1 on the scorecard. This is supposedly always the listed position in the batting order for those who face the first ball. But Wisden were unreliable on this issue during that pre-war period — as Samson proved.